A CONFESSION THAT SHAMES LABOUR
EVEN the Queen was shocked in 2008 by the way that no one appeared to have seen the UK’s economic crash coming.
During a visit to the London School of Economics in November that year, just after it happened, she asked: ‘Why did nobody notice?’
The first member of the Government to warn the public was Chancellor Alistair Darling. In August 2008, he caused a sensation when he said Britain was facing ‘the worst economic crisis for 60 years’.
Gordon Brown was furious because it demolished his claim that Britain could withstand financial turmoil in America. But Darling was right: in September 2008, the US financial giant Lehman Brothers went bust, triggering a banking collapse here.
According to Winter, the Government could have told the Queen – and everyone else – a year earlier that the economy was about to ‘fall off a cliff’.
He says that is what Miliband told him two weeks after Brown’s on-off General Election fiasco of October 2007, when he appeared to signal a snap ballot that ultimately never came.
It is known that Balls, fellow Brownite adviser Douglas Alexander and Miliband urged a wary Brown to call an early Election, but were forced to call it off when their poll ratings suddenly dipped. At the time, it was said they had wanted to cash in on Brown’s ‘political honeymoon’ three months after replacing Tony Blair – and that Balls bragged they could crush ‘weak and inexperienced David Cameron’.
But until now, no one has ever claimed it was because Labour knew the recession was coming.
Winter’s assertion that Balls and Miliband pressed for an early Election is backed up by political experts. In his authoritative biography of Gordon Brown, Dr Anthony Seldon says Balls won over Miliband, who then told him: ‘My God, we’ve got to go for it.’
And the well-informed, Laboursupporting writer Steve Richards said that when Brown told Balls the snap Election was off, ‘Balls could not believe what he was hearing’.
It led to a bitter Labour feud which poisons relations between Miliband, Balls and Alexander to this day.
Miliband and Alexander accused Balls’s cronies of trying to blame him for the fiasco. A personality clash between Miliband and Alexander, Labour’s 2015 election strategy chief, threatens to wreck their campaign.
Miliband and Balls can expect tough questions from Cameron over the disclosure they knew about the crash a year before it happened. He has repeatedly attacked them over the last Labour Government’s economic record, saying: ‘Don’t give the keys back to the people who crashed the car.’
Winter absolves Brown of any blame, saying: ‘Gordon Brown is a man of integrity, unlike Miliband, who cannot and should not be trusted. If Brown thought a crash was coming he would have seen it as his duty to remain in charge, not attempt a cheap underhand trick to dupe the public, and be there to “save the world” from the economic collapse – as he did.’